Productive morphological processes in Sri Lankan English

Abstract

The use of morphological processes in Sri Lankan English (SLE) is a prominent issue in these days. The aim of this empirical research is to identify productive morphological processes in Sri Lankan English. There is a growing interest among researchers in this field as it has massively affected language change. The preliminary data was collected through Facebook with the consent of relevant Facebook users as it is the most diversely approached social media platform in Sri Lanka. This study hypothesized that borrowing and abbreviations were the productive morphological processes in Sri Lankan English. Hundred comments were allocated out of twenty five posts that were chosen randomly. This research study was designed under both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze observational data. Productive morphological processes were selected through critical analysis based on the percentages received by each process. The findings of the study revealed that borrowing and abbreviations are the widely used productive morphological processes in Sri Lankan English while expressions, duplication and tags have considerable use. It also proved that there is a language change. It is recommended to widen the scope of research study by expanding the range of data with other social media platforms in Sri Lanka such as “Viber”, “Whatsapp”, “imo” and “Instagram”. Widening the scope of data and using other existing morphological processes will be helpful to enhance the quality of the research study.